Notes for  6 May 2026

Why does the Lord, who so often says when performing miracles, "Go and tell no one," perform such an obvious miracle, one that will certainly become known to everyone, and even a second time? After all, in order to reveal the authority of the Son of God over creation, it would have been enough to feed five thousand with five loaves...

The question as posed is off the mark, and this matters. It is not at all evident that the Lord consciously planned this situation. The Greek verb in verse 29, unlike the English "sat down," conveys an unfinished action: "having gone up on the mountain, He was sitting there." And crowds came to Him... What the Lord certainly could not do was refuse them healing and the word of life, and therefore evening came unnoticed during the preaching. He did not create the situation for a miracle deliberately, but once it arose, the miracle itself became the natural continuation of Christ's overflowing mercy.

It is also important for us that the evangelist preserves the story of the second feeding of a multitude, giving us the opportunity to see important similarities in the way the miracle is performed. Unlike the first time, the disciples no longer say skeptically that even two hundred Roman monetary units would not be enough bread for such a crowd; they ask the Teacher, where are we to get so much bread? And Christ takes what is there and gives thanks.

This is the key word of the whole account of this miracle: thanksgiving to God. It is this action that brings a miracle into the world and erases the boundary between earth and heaven.

Speaking to the people, Jesus continually tries to bring His listeners back to the foundations, to the spiritual core of the Yahwist and Jewish tradition. As we know, He was accused more than once of breaking Shabbat by healing people on the day of Shabbat. And He reminds them of circumcision, which is performed on the appointed day even when that day happens to be Shabbat. And He adds: what, then, are you accusing Me of?

The logic is clear: circumcision is only a sign of the Covenant, a sign of faithfulness to the Torah. And so, in order to mark a person's faithfulness to the Torah, it is possible to set aside the rest of Shabbat; such neglect is not considered a violation of Shabbat. Can the One who heals a person on the day of Shabbat, bringing him into the life of the Kingdom, be considered a violator of Shabbat? This is not about medicine, not about treatment, which in some cases Jewish tradition does indeed regard as a violation of Shabbat. It is about opening the Kingdom of God to a person in all its fullness. Is this not, in the end, the true meaning of Shabbat? After all, all the prohibitions and restrictions surrounding the Sabbath day ultimately have only one purpose: to shift a person's attention completely from everyday life to the presence of God, without which no spiritual life is possible.

Faithfulness to the Torah is an essential condition of communion with God; that is why circumcision, as a sign of such faithfulness, is performed even on Shabbat. And is the manifestation of the Kingdom of God not even a sign or symbol, but a vivid manifestation of that same faithfulness? If it is, why must people seize stones when the One appears who manifests the Kingdom, and manifests it in all its fullness?

In this way Jesus tries to convey to His listeners the true meaning both of Shabbat and of spiritual life itself. Yet many of them, remaining more attached to their tradition than to the Kingdom, are still ready to grab stones.

Every branch that bears fruit, the Father prunes so that it may bear more fruit. Jesus says that the disciples have already been cleansed through the word He preached, and now the task is to abide in Him.

Something within us constantly strives for independence, and this is normal, since God created us free. But when we begin seeking freedom from Him, sooner or later we receive it, and then it turns out that without the Living Vine we perish and dry up.

Most often, however, we exist like a cracked branch that still appears connected to the vine and receives nourishment from it, but the connection is weak and there is not enough sap. It depends on our choice whether it breaks off completely or is grafted back into the vine.

The Resurrection is the very heart of the Good News, but it is also the news hardest for us to grasp. When the disciples heard Jesus predict His death and Resurrection, they were "deeply distressed"; they heard only the words about death, and did not understand the words about the Resurrection.

This is not surprising: death and decay form the basis of our life experience; destruction, illness, and grief reign everywhere around us. So we do not doubt that death touched Christ as well. That is easy to believe, because it touches everyone. The Resurrection is harder: we are not always able to know this reality by experience. It seems too good to be true. It entered the lives of the apostles only when they saw the risen Christ with their own eyes. It can enter our lives in the same way it entered theirs: through the Paschal encounter, by faith and love.

The potter is not bound to the particular piece of clay from which the defective vessel was made; he does not have to shape only that clay. Yet from this very piece he forms another vessel anew. Still, it is not an entirely different vessel either: before us is the same familiar clay, but healed of its former flaws.

One of the most important biblical revelations says this: the Lord has authority to cancel what He has planned, but by His good will He remains faithful to the covenant He made with the people, even though, strictly speaking, He is not obliged to keep faith that we have unilaterally trampled. And He does not want the destruction of the unfaithful people, though He does not prevent the trials that have fallen upon them; He wants to transform them, to make them another people, healed of sinful diseases.

It may look as if the prophet stands before the Lord and intercedes for the people, guided only by his own humane considerations or family feeling. But the Lord Himself placed the prophet before Himself, which means He entrusted him with interceding for sinners. Thoughts about the justice of retribution for sins are not foreign to the prophet at all, but behind his understanding of just repayment for evil the outlines of other facets of the same justice already appear, a justice inseparable from mercy toward confused sinners.

We may be troubled by the mention of a woman's impurity after childbirth. There is no sin in this; on the contrary, by helping new life appear, she in a sense participates in the creative act together with the Creator of the world... Yet more than once in the Bible we will meet similar expressions: "born in sins," "conceived in iniquities," and so on (see, for example, Psalm 50). It seems that people have always found it obvious that birth, even as the fulfillment of God's commandment, is not absolutely free from sin, since the person who comes into the world bears the same mark of imperfection, fear, loneliness, incompleteness - in short, the same sinfulness as all of us.

And yet the idea of karma as some evil fate that invariably hangs over a person from the day of birth is deeply foreign to biblical revelation. Already in the Levitical statute we read that every child is dedicated to God (through the offering of the appropriate sacrifice), that is, potentially shares in sanctification, in liberation from every evil.